GAINESVILLE, Va., January 4, 2012 – SPEC’s Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (SPEC/GWPG) is seeking applications, algorithms and workloads for a proposed workstation performance benchmark. Early participants in the workstation working group include AMD, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Intel and NVIDIA.

“We are looking to fill a gap by providing a benchmark that measures the performance of workstations running popular applications, but without requiring the full application and associated licensing to be installed on the system under test,” says Tom Fisher, chair of the working group. “The resulting benchmark would be easy to install and run, but still rigorous enough to provide meaningful, repeatable data for performance evaluation.”

Guidelines and benefits

The group hopes to augment tests from the well-regarded SPECviewperf benchmark with code and workloads representative of those used in areas such as CAE, digital media and entertainment, finance, health sciences and energy. Among other requirements, the tests should be scalable, preferably solve large problems, support multiple architectures and be freely available to the public.

Those supplying application code and workloads accepted by the workstation group would be rewarded with multiple benefits, including expected performance improvements from vendor optimizations, widespread marketing and PR exposure, and goodwill from customers.

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) is a non-profit corporation formed to establish, maintain and endorse a standardized set of relevant benchmarks that can be applied to the newest generation of high-performance computers. SPEC’s membership includes computer hardware and software vendors, and leading universities and research facilities worldwide. For more information, visit: www.spec.org.